After my post yesterday, I wanted to do something that would show when the best times to buy and sell are. One of the biggest questions I get asked is when is the best time? For sellers, they want to know when they will get the most money for their property and for buyers, well you guessed it, when will be the cheapest time to buy. We all hear the arguments for when these times are, but I wanted to put the data into a graph and see when these times really are from a data point of view. Both charts date back to 2007, the year of the boom and bust, and this should give you a good idea of what has been happening over the last few years in the Edmonton area.

Average Residential Sales – You can see in the chart below, that there is a seasonal trend with regards to the activity of sales. You can see that in January, after the holiday season is over, sales begin to climb upwards until they peak between April – June. Both 2007 & 2008 peaked in May for the number of sales. For buyers, this is going to be the time where your competition is at its strongest and the sellers can expect the most amount of showing activity on their properties followed by increasing values.

Average Residential Sales Price – Now I am sure that this is the chart that most people want to see and it is much more volatile than the one above. Sales seem to follow closer to the trends than the prices do and you can see that in some months, the average price fluctuates by almost $30,000! I don’t pay much attention to these “blips” since we are dealing with averages, they can be thrown off by an increased number of luxury sales. I am of coarse referring to the start of this year, January – March, where you can see there were a couple of large changes and then normalized from then on. If you look, every year reaches its lowest price in January or February, but the prices almost always climb back up after the December before it. So when I see this, really, your ideal times to buy in the Edmonton area are from October – February. From this point, prices begin to creep up as the demand and sales increase. For you sellers out there, the peaks have come more midway through the year, ranging from March – July. This year was a bit different with our peak being in January followed by the lowest price in February! I would bet however that your strongest months to sell are going to be from March – July, and you should see top dollar for property during this time of year.

If you need help buying or selling a home in the Edmonton area, call me today and I would be happy to help!

Lisa Brown * REALTOR® with RE/MAX Real Estate
Cell: (780) 886-9166 * lisa@youredmontonhomes.com